Evolutionary Psychology

The goal of research in evolutionary psychology is to discover, understand, and map the human mind as well as to explore the implications of these new discoveries for other fields. The eventual aim is to map human nature—that is, the species-typical information-processing architecture of the human brain.

Like all cognitive scientists, when evolutionary psychologists refer to the mind, they mean the set of information-processing devices, embodied in neural tissue, that are responsible for all conscious and nonconscious mental activity and that generate all behavior. Like other psychologists, evolutionary psychologists test hypotheses about the design of these information-processing devices—these programs—using laboratory methods from experimental cognitive and social psychology, as well as methods drawn from experimental economics, neuropsychology, and cross-cultural field work.

What allows evolutionary psychologists to go beyond ...